Virus Protection Software from Norman

Norman Virus Control (NVC) is a collection of antivirus programs and utilities that protects your workstations and servers against malicious software. The most prevalent types of malware are viruses, worms, and trojans.

The single most important task for an anti-virus application is to keep computers free from viruses. Norman Virus Control is built around the advanced core technologies of Norman's Scanning Engine, which accurately detects known and unknown viruses, worms and trojans. When infected files are detected, NVC cleans, isolates or deletes them immediately -before the destructive code is activated. Many different programs are involved in this. Some of the most important are described below.

NVC is module based. The most important modules are:

On-access scanner

On-access scanning involves constant monitoring of the file system on servers and workstations. For an antivirus application, it is imperative to detect and block a virus before it is activated. Whenever a file is accessed in a read/write operation, or a program is executed, the On-access scanner is notified and scans the file on the fly.

Like the On-demand scanner, NVC's On-access scanner detects and repairs all types of malware. Whenever possible, an infected file is repaired before the file is handed over to the application. If repair fails, NVC denies access to the infected file. There are a number of configuration options for the On-access scanner, and in general it's a good idea to decide for a strategy when you configure this feature. NVC provides guidelines in the program, help files, and documentation.

On-demand scanner

This scanner is used for manual scans of selected areas on your machine. You can select entire drive(s), or certain folders and subfolders - even specific files - for scanning. From Windows Explorer, for example, simply point and click on the file system objects you wish to check, right-click the mouse button and select Norman Virus Control from the pop-up menu.

In networks, the system administrator can create scanning tasks to be executed, on selected, or on all workstations and servers in the organization. Tasks can be executed immediately, or scheduled for execution later, for example on fixed intervals.

Norman "Sandbox"

The Norman Sandbox module which is a part of the Norman Scanner Engine, further extending detection of new and unknown viruses. It inserts any suspicious file into a virtual computer, the Sandbox, monitoring the actions of the file in real-time. If virus behaviour is detected, it performs the necessary actions to prevent damages from the virus.

Internet Protection

The Norman Internet Protection (NIP) module scans your incoming and outgoing e-mail as well as files downloaded from News Groups. To reduce the risk of virus infection, we have added file attachment blocking. This gives the user the possibility to set up rules in different ways for attachment blocking,

Block absolutely all attachments
Block any attachment with double extensions
Block attachments with CLSID extensions

You can also choose the following exception for the last to rules, block all except with these extensions or accept all except with these extensions.

It will configure automatically, manual configuration is only necessary if your email client isn't catered for in Microsoft Internet Account Manager or Microsoft Outlook Express. NIP minimizes the threat from both new and existing e-mail worms with both the best in virus scanning and straight forward attachment blocking.

Updating NVC

Norman Internet Update (NIU) is an integrated part of the product and can be configured to regularly check for new and updated files on Norman's product servers.

Theoretically, the entire product can be available for downloading if the changes are extensive, while previous versions only updated the scanning engine.

Equally important is the possibility of distributing the updated program immediately to all workstations in the network, and to all remote users upon their next connection to the company server.

Task editor

You can use the Task editor to create task files for scans that you wish to perform on a regular basis, or special scans that you intend to run in certain situations. For example, if you download files from the Internet to designated areas, you can create a task file that scans these areas only, and run the task manually after downloads. In addition, you can schedule the task to run at a pre-selected time.

Administrators can create task files and distribute them to all workstations in the network to ensure consistent checking of areas that require special attention.

Utilities

NVC Utilities is a tool that presents an overview of the current state of affairs for the NVC components on your PC.

In addition to viewing key information, you can change certain elements by selecting some of the entries, for example Task files. Other functions, like Components, provide information only and cannot be edited from the Utilities module.

Decompression library

To be able to scan files that have been compressed with different compression formats we have designed a new decompression module. With this module NVC is now able to scan more than 30 variants like ZIP, TAR, RAR, ARJ, UUENCODE, PAK, ARC JZ etc. There is also possible to configure maximum size of compressed files to scan, maximum depth of compressed files to scan and what to do with files that differs from these rules.

Messaging

Messaging is made up from two components: Message routing and Message handling.

Message routing allows administrators to select what kind of messages that will be routed to other PCs running NVC in the network.
Message handling allows users as well as administrators to select what kind of messages that are displayed or kept locally.

The messaging functionality is an effective way of keeping track of all activity related to NVC components locally as well as in the network.

Messaging module for administrators (Corporate versions only)

Administrators are able to configure which incidents will trigger messages sent by e-mails or SMS to selected receivers. On networks using SNMP you can also configure NVC to send messages to your preferred administration tool.

System requirements and language versions

Norman Virus Control version 5 supports these operating systems:

Windows 95
Windows 98
Windows Me
Windows NT
Windows 2000
Windows XP
OS/2

For Windows 95 Internet Explorer version 4.0 or later is required.
For Windows NT Service Pack 4 or later is required.

The following language versions are available.

English
Norwegian
Dutch
German
Danish
Swedish
Finnish
Slovakian
Czech
French
Spanish
Italian
Portuguese
Polish
Slovenian
Chinese Simplified
Chinese Traditional

The administrator's needs

In NVC version 5, particular consideration has been taken to the administrators' needs that the product should be easy to install, to rollout, update, configure, maintain, and manage. More details about this here.